Indie Means I’d Rather Have My Songs Played In Commercials, Making Money, Than On The Radio Making Squat — A Documentary

The Mint Chicks – Hot On Your Heels

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Something unprecedented happened over the past five years to significantly alter the way we consume music. End of story.

Music journalist Chris Dahlen sums it up best:

“[My friend and I] love to fight about new music. I’ll condense his argument for the sake of space: he hates it. It’s too hyped and too derivative, there are too many artists choking the stuff out and slapping it on MySpace, and the Internet – and especially publications like Pitchfork – are aiding and abetting the glut, because they need something to write about.”

Music enthusiasts have discussed these culprits ad infinitum: the lamentable segue from critical music journalism to obligatory database upkeep across authoritative sources; a decrease in production value; low barriers to entry for people who want to make music, high barriers to entry for musicians who want to make money.

Adverts as the new radio; pop as 21st century heroin for jazz.

I am making a documentary about the state of music and our relationship to it — not the industry, not the musicians — just you + music and what that equals these days, where it takes you, what the new variables are, and what this means for music as art as well as commodity.

On March 10th I embark on a 15-day road trip to this end. The documentary will focus primarily on the “indie music scene,” but before you balk, consider that our inability to coin a phrase capable of better describing the environment we inhabit is only one of many issues.

Chris Miller and Tom Williams, both music journalists, as well as Sarah Mulligan, a photojournalist, will join me on this expedition. Tom and Sarah are drafting a novel and coffee table book of photographs, respectively. Chris will assist with the documentary and pursue his own jazz-related research.

Our itinerary includes New York City, Richmond, Chapel Hill, Athens (GA), New Orleans, Austin, Monterrey (Mexico), and Nashville; we are attending the SXSW and MtyMx festivals.

Further information about the trip can be found on the project’s Tumblr page, which the four of us will update regularly over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned, and thanks for your support.

RH

PS Don’t worry. “Indie Means I’d Rather Have My Songs Played In Commercials, Making Money, Than On The Radio Making Squat” won’t be the documentary’s actual title.

Pulmonary Figurines

Oberhofer – I Could Go

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You are out, Marina. You have taken gloves, both gloves, your softest purse, your thickest socks. You have zipped and unzipped boots. Your legs are shaven, the hairs rinsed down the drain. You have scrubbed the day’s saliva from your lips and now they are moist again, very, with the contents of a jar claiming to be “nervous-proof.” There are eight nail clippings living in the calf-high wastebasket of our tiled restroom. Mascara, I’m afraid, has made a sloppy cameo. Do not worry. Your navel is clean. Your arms immaculate.

The necklace you have chosen with care, as it is your only and desperate to catch the night. I have watched and said nothing throughout all this despite my breath quickening some. You are standing there one moment. You are looking past me at the salamander clock, and I can barely see your teeth. The air is thick for wordless air, but I know, I think, everything not left to say. Then you are out, and it is only I, and the clippings, and the “nervous-proof” and that awful clock shuttered in and floundering about like fish on a line or the midday homeless.

The passing hours lap at the door like waves. There is wind enough to coat the world in Spanish Moss. I am sitting in a room waiting for high tide to come spilling down the chimney, stretched out across the den like a toothpick rug. I am comforted in part by drink. Mostly, however, I try to still my hands. They have let go their amber glass. They are leading me skyward. They are gliding, palms up, along the banister, savoring each step, and I must brave the stairs sideways like a human crab. I am dragged, by the one hand, by the nape of my neck, though I am thin, as mentioned, and offer little in this way.

They are frantic, these hands, and I am spun terribly upon reaching the doorframe. I am flung across the unmade bed and crashed into the wardrobe. Nonplussed, possessed from the wrists down. I am groping, through the tie rack, for my suitcase. I am filling my things with others of my things, and I am leaving. My hands, two steps ahead, are already gone.

The house is coming, too. One way or another, I will pack the felled timber of my once home. I will breathe the rubble dust, puff out my cheeks, and hold breath to turn red, then green, blue. And I will keep holding, Marina, until what particles are there have rearranged themselves into flimsy miniatures of us, one per lung. And when I am almost, just about, the cough that claws its way out will ripple through every bone and memory living in these stupid hands. Do not worry. I will open the car doors with my jaw. I will kick my suitcase into the passenger seat. And I will be the one out for a change, driving only with an elbow, offering the curious something new to squint at between red lights.

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Ran into a few bugs here. Rubbish timing. Sit tight.

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This Month In Books, October 2009: Lorrie Moore’s “Self-Help” (short story collection) + The Chairs’ “No Fingers”

The Chairs – No Fingers

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Exercise patience and wade past “No Fingers’” opening 10 seconds of fuzz. “It’s worth it” would be an understatement.

Next up on this month’s list of books is Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help. In short, do not trust this collection of stories; it will kill you. So many of her tales deal with loss, senility, and decomposition, it’s no wonder Moore crafted what amounts to a cookbook’s antithesis, illustrating not how good lives are baked, but rather how some people go about stomaching the crumbling pastries muddying their lives. Especially family.

Two pieces in particular, “How to Be an Other Woman” and “Go Like This,” are outright works of brilliance, their incisive humor supplemented by the rigidness of Self-Help’s instruction-manual storytelling format.

From “How to Be an Other Woman:”

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

Moore’s starkness borders on heart-wrenching even when capped by wit.

I have lain. In bed. So many nights. Thinking of how it would be when I told him. And plotting, ruminating, remembering the ways our bodies used to love each other, touch, waltz. Now my body stands in the corner of the gym by the foul lines and extra crepe paper and doesn’t get asked to dance at all.
- Lorrie Moore, “Go Like This”

As for The Chairs, honestly, I debated not writing about the track at all (although it is my favorite of theirs), because its softest word — the last one! — is omitted. “Go.” They tacked it onto the beginning of the next track as a type of sound bridge between the two.

“No Fingers” simply fits Moore’s collection all too well.

Once you’ve braved the song’s remorse-laden waters, walked until you’re chin-deep, gingerly testing the seabed one tiptoe at a time, becoming Bobbing Nose And Eyes, and wondering whether the next step will be the one that finds your hair lapping at the ocean’s surface, you learn to trust it. You rub the salty sting of minor-chord-piano from your eyes and stand.

There lies a sandbar ahead where waves lick gently at your ankles, where the words “I want my time back” have no place, where your children understand if you have to, and where you understand if he has to, and your mother dies peacefully before asking who you are and what you’re doing at her bedside wiping the spittle from her nightgown.

There lies a shoal ahead. There has to.

[Buy Lorrie Moore's Self-Help, The Chairs' Website]

This Month In Books, October 2009: When Amy Hempel’s “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel” Met Michael Hurley’s “Parsnip Snips” LP

Michael Hurley – Light Green Fellow

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I’m beginning to wonder whether the artistic media my escapism hopscotches upon from one month to the next mimics the seasons. The nature of the content I engage per medium certainly adheres to this trajectory, so it would stand to reason the part of me that chooses literature over film in fall, or music over art in spring, too, would assent to these quarterly inclinations.

I spent the better part of October with my nose dripping into book after book. (Perhaps October is the time when one craves endless streams of letter-sized visual stimuli?) Above is a picture of this month’s lot; you can find the more compelling pieces at the top of the pile and the most odious at the very bottom. Please note, I have chosen not to include comics and graphic novels as part of this series; a separate column shall be dedicated exclusively to this end.

And now, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel and Michael Hurley’s haunting Parsnip Snips LP.

Michael Hurley – New Tea

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Years ago, during an interview where The Atlantic Monthly inquired about her writing process, Amy Hempel responded with the following statement:

“It [represents] the way I read. I’m not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I’m interested in who’s telling it and how they’re telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.

While, generally speaking, it’s rare for me to agree with those who subscribe to the philosophy that a work’s greatness often relies more heavily on the medium its inscribed than the content itself, I cannot help but make exception when it comes to this particular collection of short stories. (And, believe me, the content is nothing short of stunning.) Hempel’s insistence on emphasizing delivery above carefully structured plot development is one of the primary reasons her works are regarded as such jarring, heartbreaking masterpieces.

The last page of Hempel’s famed “In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Burried” remorsefully reads:

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.

Baby, drink milk.

Baby, play ball.

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

The best way for a writer to become more than a writer, to yield words that are more than words, is to embrace storytelling, to utilize the act of writing in an increasingly creative fashion — never as obligatory tool of the trade, but rather as an omnipresent, gainfully employed silent character.

And no short story author, really, no one accomplishes this feat with as much precision as Amy Hempel.

Which leads me, now, to Michael Hurley, the man whose recently reissued Parsnip Snips LP provided the aural backdrop during my time spent gulping down Hempel’s works.

So, how shall I put this?

I walk the track, the stars refuse to shine,
And it seemed like every minute, I was gonna lose my mind.
-Michael Hurley, “New Tea”

I like to think no state of peace, or war, or lending, no cavalry decree could gloom a man so as to produce a solemner gesture than Michael Hurley’s “New Tea.”

Hurley’s Parsnip Snips found me upon streets lined auburn, sidewalks spiced with unswept death and the sad sigh of fallen things, though I imagine the wispy draft of Hurley’s melancholic timbre enough to spirit any living person away.

The first page of Hempel’s “Tumble Home” closes with the devastating line, “How can I possibly put an end to this when it feels so good to pull sounds out of my body and show them to you?”

Which seems as concise a way as any for me to say that I desperately hope you get your hands on a copy of either Hempel’s or Hurley’s brilliant creations. Please.

[Buy "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel", Michael Hurley's Parsnip Snips LP]